Best Practices and Insights for Facilitating Creativity, Alignment & Organizational Results

Author: Laurie Durnell

Increasingly teams are being mashed together: different specialties or functions, or different parts of organizations being merged as a result of leadership experimenting with cost-cutting or efficiency initiatives. This new landscape of teaming benefits from focused approaches to syncing up these newly formed teams. The goal is to integrate their efforts smoothly and achieve the organizational benefits they were reconfigured to achieve.

For example, in multiple ...

Author: Rachel Smith

In The Grove’s recent Facilitating Virtual Collaboration workshop, the topic came up about how facilitators can engage participants in a remote meeting so that they don’t check email, tune out, stop listening, and fail to … well… participate. My unusual and occasionally unpopular advice: it’s not entirely your problem.

 Let me clarify. As a facilitator, and especially as a facilitator of remote meetings, it’s my job to create a space in which people can do their best ...

Collaboration, networking, relationship. These ideas resonate with many in The Grove’s network, from clients and associates to consultancies in places all around the world that wish to foster creativity and collaboration in their businesses. With this last group, the consultancies, we have formalized a pathway to partner with The Grove.

Who We Partner With

The Grove Partners Program is for small-to-mid-size consulting firms collaborating with The Grove on client work, licensing Grove m...

Want to make your writing more legible when you are working on charts at work—or any other time when having readable handwriting smooths the way? Watch this short tutorial with Grove consultant Malgosia Kostecka:

In these turbulent times The Grove, like everyone else, is heading into rising levels of uncertainty. We know that uncertainty is also a challenge for all of our clients as well as the visual practitioners and change leaders we support. It feels like a perfect storm, and we’re preparing for the big waves.

Navigating Waves of Change

When change comes quickly from external forces that you can’t control, there are some imperatives. It is vital to support your people aligning on core va...

Author: Laurie Durnell

The landscape of teaming no longer centers around just a single team working on one challenge for a period of time. Yes, such teams still exist, yet increasingly teams are as fluid as flocks of birds that fly through the sky, separate into pods, swirl back together and re-form again. Although every bird is more or less flying in the same direction, the configuration that any one bird is flying in and the group that is its flock differ from moment-to-moment.

For many years, The Grove has created an illustrated calendar. This year we’ve decided to offer a digital version to any and all. Artists Tiffany Forner and Malgosia Kostecka have integrated words and imagery in meaningful and metaphoric ways—much like the way we work with clients.

Two calendar formats are available:

Download/Print a one-page 11″x17″ calendar PDF.

Download/Print a 14-page 8.5″x11″ calendar (one-page-per-month) PDF.

We hope these whimsical combinations inspire you in th...

Author: Malgosia Kostecka

Earlier this year, I attended the International Forum for Visual Practitioners, an annual convening of people who use visuals to build understanding. Among the keynote speakers was cartoonist and cartoon theorist Scott McCloud, a personal hero of mine. Here are my visual notes from his presentation.

As a graphic recorder, I especially resonate with Scott’s point that “there are no neutral visual decisions, and every decision matters.” When choosing shapes and col...

Author: Tiffany Forner

I’ve worked on many Grove Storymap® projects during my 18 years at The Grove. In the beginning, it felt like wading through a swamp of data, struggling to find a way to communicate a client’s complex situation in a clear and simple way. This kind of information design was not like anything I learned as a design major in college.

After years of practice and collaboration with my esteemed colleagues, Laurie Durnell and Rachel Smith among others, it has gotten easier. ...